August 24, 2005 - Grow Your Harness Naturally

I wrote this article for the March 2005 issue of Better Software. Now available for the first time online... enjoy!

I have worked with many testing common organizations where a common pattern is repeated over and over. It goes something like
this — we realize there is more manual testing to do than time available, we decide to automate the testing, and we begin working
on a test harness. Several weeks later, we have the start of a harness, but it’s barely useful and we still have not written any
tests. At this point, we’re behind — so we abandon the harness
and revert to manual testing.